O.J. Simpson’s smile might as well have been a mask.
So much ugliness, so much duplicity—so much violence—hid behind its seemingly happy exterior. Rarely have malice and murder presented such a charming face to the world.
It is difficult for people who were not alive then to grasp why his public transformation from affable ex-jock, sometime movie star and constant pitchman into a killer cold enough to orphan his own children seemed so shocking.
That is because they have no memories of how charming the man could be before his demons consumed him and brought tragedy to those closest to him.
Simpson earned his public reputation first as a college and professional football star. He was a running back of rare grace and power, one who had almost a preternatural ability to elude tackles and the speed of a track star.
He was considered both the antithesis of and the answer to Cleveland Browns great Jim Brown. Both Brown and Simpson, in addition to being superb athletes, were spectacularly handsome men.
Brown’s countenance, though, was often clouded by a scowl. He was a man visibly troubled—and often angered—by racial inequities and injustices.
Simpson was a different story.
His visage glowed with a radiance furnished by his 1,000-kilowatt smile. The resulting glow made it impossible to discern the furies and insecurities that seethed behind the light.
That grin made it possible for him to transition seamlessly from the gridiron to the small screen and then the big one. He made his mark first helping to push rental cars in a series of TV commercials that relied heavily on his physical agility and his seeming affability to do the selling.
He followed Brown’s path into the movies.
Whereas Brown, though, carved out a celluloid career playing first taciturn action heroes and eventually sneering heavies, Simpson blazed a different trail.
His breeziness made him a natural for the role of the friendly, mishap-prone oaf in the “Naked Gun” movies. His charm while doing one pratfall or slapstick bit after another endeared him not just to audiences, but to an entire country.
That charm was also what made the revelation that he could be ruthless enough to kill his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a friend of hers, Ronald Goldman, in cold blood so startling.
We just did not want to believe that a man who seemed to radiate niceness could be so amoral, so unrepenting after an act that monstrous.
His arrest—with the slow-motion car chase—and trial transfixed the nation. He secured top-flight legal talent to secure an acquittal.
After that, Simpson was less fortunate.
The surviving families of his victims filed a civil suit against him. Because the burden of proof is less onerous in civil litigation than criminal cases, the Goldman and Brown families were able to hold him accountable for the deaths of their loved ones.
From there, Simpson engaged in conduct that was increasingly tawdry and insensitive. He entered into a book deal that was supposed to offer a “hypothetical” confession to the murders, a particularly noxious scam that came to naught when the Goldman family asserted a claim on any earnings from the publication as part of the civil judgment the families had won.
He engaged in other, similar peek-a-boo games regarding the homicides, treating them almost as performance art pieces rather than tragedies and sources of immense suffering, seemingly oblivious to the pain he was causing, among others, the two children he had fathered with his murdered ex-wife.
There were other schemes and hustles along the way.
One went sideways because he tried to rob and kidnap two sports memorabilia dealers. Caught, tried and—this time—convicted, he spent nine years in prison.
O.J. Simpson died the other day following a cancer diagnosis. He was 76.
His death prompted Ron Goldman’s father to say that Simpson’s death just brought into focus how many years of life his son had lost.
There’s a cliché that says that the good one does on this earth lives on.
O.J. Simpson proved that the same is true for the evil one does.